Odera Trains Chipu’s Focus On 2018

After reaching the Rugby Africa Barthes U20 Cup final in April 2017, Chipu Head Coach Paul Odera has set his sights on 2018, targeting overall victory in this competition and with it, qualification to World Rugby’s Junior World Trophy.

Speaking after a training camp this past weekend in Gilgil, Odera said, ” The aim of the camp was to set a base for conditioning. Mike Owino, the conditioning coach, was looking at where the players are in terms of their agility,endurance and sprint ability as well.”

“The second goal was to assess their skill levels in terms of how we want to play the game next year. We analyzed the two games we played in Madagascar and looked at the areas we did well in and those we did not do well in and that gave us a basis for our training sessions over the weekend.The third goal was to introduce how the team is to play in the coming year.Those were the three things that we looked to achieve in the camp.We got to the final…the next target is to go one better and qualify for the Junior World Trophy by winning the Barthes Cup. That is indeed a tall order..It’s possible within the year to cover that ground.What is crucial is that we get our conditioning right because Namibia blew us away in the last 20 minutes and scored almost 20 points. What was interesting when we did our analysis is that we actually played better against Namibia than we did against Zimbabwe yet we soaked 60 points,” he added.

“Our conditioning coach starts a conditioning program for the team from August into September…I will come in later in with other coaches to fine tune their skills and if certain players have not hit their targets by December we will need to have a conversation with them on how to achieve those targets otherwise we will have to review what needs to be done moving forward. ”